Is the Cross a Good Thing?
If you're like me, the news this year has been giving you Holy Week flashbacks throughout the Easter season. But I actually think this is a good thing. This Sunday, I will be talking to the kids about the questions that Holy Week still leaves us with even after Easter, such as: How was the cross a “good” thing? Who killed Jesus? and Why did Jesus have to die? I am still figuring out my own answers to these questions.
In the gospel of John, Jesus talks about his impending death with the disciples during the Last Supper, right before it happens. Judas stands up from the table and stalks out to go betray him, and Jesus tells the rest of the disciples that he must face this alone. The cross is not for them yet; but he wants them to know that for HIM, it is a good thing. He even calls it “glorious.”
My favorite preacher Frederick Buechner explains: "God so loved the world that he gave his only son even to this obscene horror; so loved the world that in some ultimately indescribable way and at some ultimately immeasurable cost he gave the world himself. Out of this terrible death, John says, came eternal life not just in the sense of resurrection to life after death but in the sense of life so precious even this side of death that to live it is to stand with one foot already in eternity. To participate in the sacrificial life and death of Jesus Christ is to live already in his kingdom. This is the essence of the Christian message, the heart of the Good News, and it is why the cross has become the chief Christian symbol. A cross of all things—a guillotine, a gallows—but the cross at the same time as the crossroads of eternity and time, as the place where such a mighty heart was broken that the healing power of God himself could flow through it into a sick and broken world. It was for this reason that of all the possible words they could have used to describe the day of his death, the word they settled on was good. Good Friday."
The truth is, good and evil still coexist. But the cross is still holding it all together. If you are like me, you will need more than a season - you will need a whole life to unpack that mystery.
with love, Pr. Chelsea
